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Kids will be kids

I’m having a very quiet afternoon. That’s because Preteen has been SLEEPING ever since he came home from the birthday-party-that-turned-into-a-sleepover this morning. Now, if I’d been a “good mother,” I wouldn’t have fallen for the “but Travis is going to stay overnight” line. Or the “but Amr’s moving away on Thursday and this is our last time to all hang out together” line. I would have responded with, “that’s too bad, but your all-school sixth grade party was last night and you didn’t get to bed until after 1:00 a.m. then, so NO! Absolutely not. You cannot stay overnight at Amr’s tonight.”

But instead I caved. I did at least talk to Amr’s mom. I KNOW those boys strong-armed her into doing this. But she honestly didn’t seem to mind. She said, “well, we ARE moving next week. And this IS their last time to be together…”

And apparently they REALLY wanted to “be together” because they felt it necessary to stay up all night! Even after being up so late the night before, too. Preteen stayed up most of/all night a couple years ago, too…and gee, he didn’t feel so good when he came home. At the time he said he was “never going to stay up so late again.” And he did stick to that for a while. In fact, he turned down every sleepover he was invited to for well over a year after that.

Ah well. This was probably pretty good timing. We just went through the friend-moving-away thing a year ago (only that friend and Preteen were inseparable — they were together just about every day). That friend moved to West Virginia (this one is moving to California), but he and his dad are coming for a visit in a couple of weeks. Preteen got an e-mail from him saying, “I can come to Iowa, but my parents wanted me to tell your parents that I don’t have any place to stay if I come because my dad’s going to be busy doing grown-up things.” (I wonder how close that is to what his parents actually said?) At any rate, the friend is, of course, going to be staying with us. And I’m HOPING that after this experience last night that the two of them will decide to GET SOME SLEEP that weekend! (This is the friend Preteen stayed up too late with the other time.)

And here we are just one week later, and we’re doing another sleepover (this time at our house). We’ll see whether Preteen truly learned anything about staying up too late last weekend…(supposedly, they’re going to bed at 12:30…we’ll see…)